[R-G] Žižek: Resistance Is Surrender

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/print/zize01_.html
LRB 15 November 2007

Resistance Is Surrender
Slavoj Žižek

One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism
is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the
salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always
rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao's attempt, in the
Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in
its triumphant return.

Today's Left reacts in a wide variety of ways to the hegemony of
global capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy. It
might, for example, accept the hegemony, but continue to fight for
reform within its rules (this is Third Way social democracy).

Or, it accepts that the hegemony is here to stay, but should
nonetheless be resisted from its 'interstices'.

Or, it accepts the futility of all struggle, since the hegemony is so
all-encompassing that nothing can really be done except wait for an
outburst of 'divine violence' – a revolutionary version of Heidegger's
'only God can save us.'

Or, it recognises the temporary futility of the struggle. In today's
triumph of global capitalism, the argument goes, true resistance is
not possible, so all we can do till the revolutionary spirit of the
global working class is renewed is defend what remains of the welfare
state, confronting those in power with demands we know they cannot
fulfil, and otherwise withdraw into cultural studies, where one can
quietly pursue the work of criticism.

Or, it emphasises the fact that the problem is a more fundamental one,
that global capitalism is ultimately an effect of the underlying
principles of technology or 'instrumental reason'.

Or, it posits that one can undermine global capitalism and state
power, not by directly attacking them, but by refocusing the field of
struggle on everyday practices, where one can 'build a new world'; in
this way, the foundations of the power of capital and the state will
be gradually undermined, and, at some point, the state will collapse
(the exemplar of this approach is the Zapatista movement).

Or, it takes the 'postmodern' route, shifting the accent from
anti-capitalist struggle to the multiple forms of politico-ideological
struggle for hegemony, emphasising the importance of discursive
re-articulation.

Or, it wagers that one can repeat at the postmodern level the
classical Marxist gesture of enacting the 'determinate negation' of
capitalism: with today's rise of 'cognitive work', the contradiction
between social production and capitalist relations has become starker
than ever, rendering possible for the first time 'absolute democracy'
(this would be Hardt and Negri's position).

These positions are not presented as a way of avoiding some 'true'
radical Left politics – what they are trying to get around is, indeed,
the lack of such a position. This defeat of the Left is not the whole
story of the last thirty years, however. There is another, no less
surprising, lesson to be learned from the Chinese Communists'
presiding over arguably the most explosive development of capitalism
in history, and from the growth of West European Third Way social
democracy. It is, in short: we can do it better. In the UK, the
Thatcher revolution was, at the time, chaotic and impulsive, marked by
unpredictable contingencies. It was Tony Blair who was able to
institutionalise it, or, in Hegel's terms, to raise (what first
appeared as) a contingency, a historical accident, into a necessity.
Thatcher wasn't a Thatcherite, she was merely herself; it was Blair
(more than Major) who truly gave form to Thatcherism.

The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this
predicament is to call for a new politics of resistance. Those who
still insist on fighting state power, let alone seizing it, are
accused of remaining stuck within the 'old paradigm': the task today,
their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its
terrain and creating new spaces outside its control. This is, of
course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism. The
politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a
Third Way Left.

Simon Critchley's recent book, Infinitely Demanding, is an almost
perfect embodiment of this position.[*] For Critchley, the
liberal-democratic state is here to stay. Attempts to abolish the
state failed miserably; consequently, the new politics has to be
located at a distance from it: anti-war movements, ecological
organisations, groups protesting against racist or sexist abuses, and
other forms of local self-organisation. It must be a politics of
resistance to the state, of bombarding the state with impossible
demands, of denouncing the limitations of state mechanisms. The main
argument for conducting the politics of resistance at a distance from
the state hinges on the ethical dimension of the 'infinitely
demanding' call for justice: no state can heed this call, since its
ultimate goal is the 'real-political' one of ensuring its own
reproduction (its economic growth, public safety, etc). 'Of course,'
Critchley writes,

history is habitually written by the people with the guns and sticks
and one cannot expect to defeat them with mocking satire and feather
dusters. Yet, as the history of ultra-leftist active nihilism
eloquently shows, one is lost the moment one picks up the guns and
sticks. Anarchic political resistance should not seek to mimic and
mirror the archic violent sovereignty it opposes.

So what should, say, the US Democrats do? Stop competing for state
power and withdraw to the interstices of the state, leaving state
power to the Republicans and start a campaign of anarchic resistance
to it? And what would Critchley do if he were facing an adversary like
Hitler? Surely in such a case one should 'mimic and mirror the archic
violent sovereignty' one opposes? Shouldn't the Left draw a
distinction between the circumstances in which one would resort to
violence in confronting the state, and those in which all one can and
should do is use 'mocking satire and feather dusters'? The ambiguity
of Critchley's position resides in a strange non sequitur: if the
state is here to stay, if it is impossible to abolish it (or
capitalism), why retreat from it? Why not act with(in) the state? Why
not accept the basic premise of the Third Way? Why limit oneself to a
politics which, as Critchley puts it, 'calls the state into question
and calls the established order to account, not in order to do away
with the state, desirable though that might well be in some utopian
sense, but in order to better it or attenuate its malicious effect'?

These words simply demonstrate that today's liberal-democratic state
and the dream of an 'infinitely demanding' anarchic politics exist in
a relationship of mutual parasitism: anarchic agents do the ethical
thinking, and the state does the work of running and regulating
society. Critchley's anarchic ethico-political agent acts like a
superego, comfortably bombarding the state with demands; and the more
the state tries to satisfy these demands, the more guilty it is seen
to be. In compliance with this logic, the anarchic agents focus their
protest not on open dictatorships, but on the hypocrisy of liberal
democracies, who are accused of betraying their own professed
principles.

The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack
on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of this strange
symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical
outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their
beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don't agree with the
government's policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even
profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the
already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise
it. Thus George Bush's reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his
visit to London, in effect: 'You see, this is what we are fighting
for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their
government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!'

It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chávez has embarked since
2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left:
far from resisting state power, he grabbed it (first by an attempted
coup, then democratically), ruthlessly using the Venezuelan state
apparatuses to promote his goals. Furthermore, he is militarising the
barrios, and organising the training of armed units there. And, the
ultimate scare: now that he is feeling the economic effects of
capital's 'resistance' to his rule (temporary shortages of some goods
in the state-subsidised supermarkets), he has announced plans to
consolidate the 24 parties that support him into a single party. Even
some of his allies are sceptical about this move: will it come at the
expense of the popular movements that have given the Venezuelan
revolution its élan? However, this choice, though risky, should be
fully endorsed: the task is to make the new party function not as a
typical state socialist (or Peronist) party, but as a vehicle for the
mobilisation of new forms of politics (like the grass roots slum
committees). What should we say to someone like Chávez? 'No, do not
grab state power, just withdraw, leave the state and the current
situation in place'? Chávez is often dismissed as a clown – but
wouldn't such a withdrawal just reduce him to a version of
Subcomandante Marcos, whom many Mexican leftists now refer to as
'Subcomediante Marcos'? Today, it is the great capitalists – Bill
Gates, corporate polluters, fox hunters – who 'resist' the state.

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on
'infinite' demands we know those in power cannot fulfil. Since they
know that we know it, such an 'infinitely demanding' attitude presents
no problem for those in power: 'So wonderful that, with your critical
demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live
in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do
with what is possible.' The thing to do is, on the contrary, to
bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise,
finite demands, which can't be met with the same excuse.

Note

Verso, 168 pp., £17.99, May, 978 1 84467 121 2.

Slavoj Žižek is a dialectical-materialist philosopher and
psychoanalyst. He also co-directs the International Centre for
Humanities at Birkbeck College. The Parallax View appeared last year.